Strange Growths
Blossoms bizarre appear on the northern sky; they bloom like lilies in a field of graves. Strange growths the Earth gives, as the blossoms bloom in the northern sky.
The author of these words is a Buddhist priest who wishes to remain anonymous. This priest believes that words cannot be owned. Therefore, words are free. Who can own a little piece of writing? “Oh, please, give me back my sentence,” imagine one saying. “Stop! Or I’ll harangue you!” yells the word police. These were the priest’s words, not mine, mind you. From the heights of Nepal, he uttered those words and gave them to the world. “It’s free,” he said. “Do with them as you wish.”
I didn’t know what to do with them. I wrote those words down on the cover of my journal, and took them home with me. But now, thinking back to that time, I keep hitting myself on the head… As I read the words over and over in a sing-song voice, I ask myself: what in hell are those blossoms?
The Northern Sky is the Aurora in disguise. She watches the blossoms in safety, in fear of the strange growths contaminants. And the blossoms bloom in the northern sky.
In his strange world, it seems, the Dawn approaches from the North. This may be symbolic of the world turned on its side, as if we are beings gone awry. Mystic ways shape the mind in mysterious ways. Why do I know the writings of this anonymous Buddhist priest? He was a friend of mine until he renounced the world. At that point, I became only a person whom he once knew. Atanasio Mafimondo was his given name. His name is now Bashkir.
* * *
The silhouette of a little boy approaches me. Suddenly, the Earth is taken from beneath me and my face is planted on the soft dirt. I think that someone is trying to bury me. Then, softly like a bee, his scratchy voice enters my ears: “my name is Atanasio Mafimondo. You have killed my father. Prepare to die.”
I turn to him, and in a moment of genius, I reply, “who the fuck are you?”
“I’m in your English class with Mrs. Dorian. I sit way in the back, by the window.”
“Oh, I see. Can you get off me now?”
“Sure,” and he sits up. “What’s your name?”
“None of your business,” I say to him and start to walk away.
“Hey, what’s that stuck to your butt?” he asks and points at my ass. I turn around and around trying to look to where he is pointing. “Ha! Ha! Woof! Woof! You’re just like a dog. I’ll call you Snoopy. Come here, Snoopy.”
* * *
Yes, he really called me that. I was in junior high then. We were twelve years old, and that’s how we met.
* * *
When I got to the monastery, he introduced me to everyone as “the one whom I once knew as Snoopy.” I almost fell to the floor laughing. The others there didn’t even crack a smile. I felt out of place.
Opulence, the extra stuff not necessary for life, doesn’t exist in this place. It’s high up a chain of mountains and out of everyone’s mind. This place doesn’t exit for most of the people on this Earth. It’s nowhere; therefore, reasons my friend Atanasio Mafimondo, it’s Utopia.
He sits on a huge boulder, and I see that he is reading something. The first thought in my mind is, how did he get up that boulder? I circle it and can’t see a niche anywhere where I could get a hold to lift myself up.
“Aten,” I say loudly. He doesn’t respond. Then, I remember his current name. “Bashkir,” I call to him.
“Yes, what do you, whom I once knew as Snoopy, want?”
“How did you get up there?” I ask him.
“Trade secret. To know the Truth is to ascend the need to question such stuff.”
“What stuff?” I ask, perplexed.
“The need to question such worldly marvels. Enlightenment is a process, not a state of being. To understand the world, you must follow the light.”
So, I circle to the left and look up at the boulder with the sun at my back. And there it was: a grayish rope, colored to match the boulder’s surface, lay unmoving within my shadow. I grab it and pull myself up. He doesn’t turn as I land on top, but keeps on reading.
“The questions you ask based on a given situation reveals parts of your personality. Did I ever tell you that?” he asks me.
“No. But I could have guessed.”
“You didn’t ask me what I was reading. The fact that you questioned my physical activity, being up on this boulder, instead of what I was doing with my mind, tells me that you are mostly a physical being. You are easily impressed by physical phenomena.”
“OK,” I say, “what are you reading?”
“Playboy,” he says with authority.
“What?”
* * *
We were bookworms. We wormed our way through ten thousand books in ten years. That’s a thousand books per year, not counting our requirements in college.
“What are you reading now?” He is calling from Germany.
“I’m reading One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
“Do you like it?” he asks.
“Yes. It’s very interesting. I really love his style.”
“I see. Shirley says hello. She’s reading a book by Isabela Allende…”
“Isabel,” I correct him.
“Don’t call me names.”
* * *
Suddenly, I felt that he was no longer a part of my life. In graduate school, we didn’t talk as much as we had. We would occasionally phone each other at birthdays and sometimes during certain holidays: those were the special days. A different woman answered the phone every time that I called him at school.
* * *
I was typing away at my thesis, The Incubation Period of Textual Assimilation, when he called this one time. He asked me how my thesis was coming along. I said it was going well. When I told him the title, he said that I should change it to The Succubus is Having her Period on my Textbook. I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry.
* * *
“Because, one must test oneself against temptation.” His eyes are still glued to his magazine.
“You jerk off to those magazines, don’t you?”
“But that’s not the temptation.”
“But, isn’t physical pleasure itself the temptation?”
“No. The physical temptation is sex, not autoeroticism. You misunderstand me. In the beginning the Word was made flesh; therefore, we must take the flesh out of the word. Capisci?”
“You make no sense.”
“That is the path to Enlightenment.”
So, nonsense is enlightenment, and nowhere is paradise. That is an appealing thought. I’m very glad that I didn’t follow that path.
He came to me when I was in a vacuum. I was in post-doc at Stanford when he visited me for the last time as Atanasio Mafimondo. He had finished his first novel and came by to give it to me. “Words should be free, so do with this as you like.” He handed me a cardboard box the size of a full ream of paper. I looked at it in horror. “Are you serious about this?” I asked him. “Of course. Also, I leave you my share of books that is part of our library.” He was serious. When he left, I opened the package and read the title of the book: The Will of the Salamander. It was his parting joke.
I wouldn’t see him for ten years after that meeting. During those years, I received tenure, finished my first monograph, wrote ten articles and published three books on Magical Realism. And, I became a divorcee. I didn’t even notice that she was gone. A week after it was all settled, I came back to our house, now my house, closed the door behind me and fell to the floor in tears. Where had I been all those years? Something broke inside of me that night. After fighting my way through a storm, I suddenly found myself in an air-tight room. The only thing I could hear was my heart beating.
I knew I was alive, but I didn’t know what to do. I called in sick for a few days, and they became worried. Then, two days after I had gone back to work, I received a letter from Bashkir. It simply said: I think you need to visit me, now.
I’m banging my head on the seat in front of me. There’s no one in the airplane because they let me in early. The plane won’t leave for another twenty minutes, but they let me in early because it was cold outside. I am banging my head on the seat in front of me because I should have asked about the blossoms. I can’t believe he was reading Playboy.
I close my eyes and sleep the rest of the way home with a brief overture of consciousness at New Delhi.
* * *
A week after I got home from Nepal, I received a letter from Bashkir: I burnt my books when I got here like we saw in Razor’s Edge. The only thing I could get my hands on was this Playboy. But, I’ve read it twelve times now. Please send more books. I promise I won’t ‘enlighten’ them.
